Topography: portraits of places

William Pars was a more typical 18th-century topographical painter who supported himself in Italy by providing watercolours for publication as prints. He settled in Rome in where he painted views such as 'St Peter's Rome: But as patrons began to appreciate British landscape paintings, there was less need for landscape artists to travel to Italy; John Constable famously never left Britain.

Nonetheless, something of Claude's vision continued to affect British artists in Italy. Samuel Palmer wrote, 'You can only look at dazzling palaces, blazing in Italian sunshine, with your eyes half shut.

British Watercolours The Landscape Genre - Victoria and Albert Museum

Indeed, Italian air and Italian light, and the azure of an Italian sky can scarcely be imagined in England'. This image of Italy is captured by his bright, colourful vision of 'The Villa d'Este', though in reality it rained for much of his visit to Italy in Andrew Donaldson, later a painter of historical and religious subjects, visited Italy in as a serious student of classical sculpture and Renaissance painting. However, his delightful landscape of the 'Villa Borghese, Rome' shows that the Italian landscape continued to enchant, and could seduce artists away from their other studies.

Ruins were originally of interest mainly to antiquarians, and the Antiquarian Society which formed in the early 18th century, employed a number of artists to record notable sites.

Ruins gained a new currency in the late 18th century as a subject for landscape painting through William Gilpin's 'Picturesque Tours', published from According to Gilpin, ruins were 'useful' in a landscape because their broken lines - enhanced by moss, ivy, a wall topped with twisting bushes - provided variety' through irregularity, which delighted the eye.

Despite such satire, Rowlandson's unfinished view of 'Netley Abbey' shows that ruins might independently appeal to the eye of an artist. It is a very simple image, with neither the architectural detail of interest to antiquarians, nor the 'picturesque variety' which Gilpin felt justified the place of a ruin in a landscape.


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Thomas Girtin, along with his friend J M W Turner, brought to the topographical description of ruins a grandeur that went beyond either architectural or picturesque detail. Both Girtin and Turner were trained in the tradition of architectural topography of M A Rooker, but painted watercolours with a ground-breaking breadth of vision. To many of their generation ruins were melancholy remains of a lost age of faith. Girtin evoked this romantic mood, without losing sight of the architecture of a building. His distant but atmospheric view of 'Kirkstall Abbey - Evening', compares interestingly with Rowlandson's more prosaic view of 'Netley'.

William Callow was working half a century after Girtin's death, when romantic images of ruined abbeys had become wearyingly familiar.

Victoria and Albert Museum

Callow's image of 'Easby Abbey' is therefore notable for its strong, distinctive quality, the sense of drama in his choice of angle, and the solidity of his crisp, bright colours. Paul Sandby's 'Landscape with Mountains' is a peaceful image of a man contemplating a mountainous landscape. It is in marked contrast to the distaste of previous generations, for whom mountains were lumpen, dangerous obstructions. Writing in the s, a surveyor, Captain Birt, called mountains 'monstrous excrescences Instead he utilized broad washes of strong color and introduced pen, brown ink and varnish to achieve richer tonality.

Victoria and Albert Museum.

Both Turner and Constable were strongly admired by the French Impressionists and were an influence in their development. Constable is considered one of the major English landscape artists of the 19th Century. His art was admired by Delacroix and Gericault and influenced the masters of Barbizon and even the Impressionists, although he did not achieved much fame during his lifetime in England, his own country. Cotman came to London from his native Norwich in and soon entered the circle of artists centred around Dr Thomas Monro, a physician who welcomed watercolourists into his home, providing a meeting place, and offering financial support and the opportunity to study and copy his impressive collection.

Cotman travelled widely around Britain, producing many pencil drawings and colour sketches that he later worked up into carefully patterned watercolors.

British Golden Age

John Sell Cotman also produced watercolors with a kind of startling modernity, and these works only gained popularity in the 20 th Century. Kenneth Clark, in his book, Landscape Into Art, states: This is one of the many things about him which alienate continental opinion, for the classic tradition has never consider water-colour a medium of serious painting. There is no doubt that as time went on Turner, like Cezanne, was influenced in his oil technique by his experience of water-colour.

In many of his later pictures the oil medium is used so exactly like water-colour that in reproduction it is impossible to tell which is which.

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Around , Turner became the first watercolorist to extensively utilize the wet-in-wet resources of the medium. He used the wet paper to float and mingle large areas of color, and through the development of these techniques, he was able to increase the size of his paintings to three feet or more. The late Turner watercolors, which transitioned from the finite detail of his early paintings to the later luminous abstract works, were still based on heightened experiences in nature.

Developing an Eye for Landscape Composition

The importance of the 19 th Century British watercolorists has often been underestimated. It is true that the late works of Turner did not contribute to the development of art. These works, often called sketches, were not even exhibited until a few were presented in Turner painted the elements of nature, destructive forces, avalanches, whirlwinds, and deluges. A number of architectural painters were in fact first trained as architects but their carefully delineated views increasingly found a wider market among those curious about places unknown to them, or those who enjoyed the already familiar and well loved.

In the early 19th century more artists took advantage of the opportunities for foreign travel, exploring new subjects in the landscape and cultures of other countries.

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The 19th century saw a flowering of interest in history, encouraged by the publication in of the first of many historical novels by Sir Walter Scott. The establishment of exhibition societies was one of the great innovations in artistic life in 18th-century Britain. The Society of Artists opened in and the Royal Academy held its first exhibition in Watercolours at these early exhibitions were exhibited as 'drawings' which had been 'stained' or 'tinted'. The popularity and success of the watercolour societies attracted many illustrators, such as Charles Green, into the field of watercolour painting.

Still life, the depiction of inanimate objects such as fruit, vegetables, dead game and household objects, became a popular subject for watercolour artists. Still lives appealed to patrons for the simplicity of their subject matter, and were admired above all for the skill of the artist. This is a unique training opportunity for museum professionals from overseas who are interested in attracting and programming for a range of museum audiences.